Album: Joey Ramone

Don't Worry About Me, Sanctuary

There's little trace, on this posthumous solo debut, of the debilitating effects of the lymphatic cancer that killed Joey Ramone last April, though the subject does force its way into a few songs – most notably "I Got Knocked Down (But I'll Get Up)", which opens with the line "Sitting in a hospital bed", repeated four times, according to the Ramone Standard Delivery Rules drawn up aeons ago. His decline is treated with characteristically mordant humour in tracks like "Mr Punchy" – the latest addition to the fine Ramones tradition of cheerfully un-PC references to mental illness – and "Stop Thinking About It", in which Joey chides an indecisive friend with the observation, "When you finally make your mind up, I'll be buried in my grave". The typically ironic title-track, meanwhile, is matched by the opening salvo of "What A Wonderful World", a cross between Louis Armstrong and "Pretty Vacant". Alongside such expected topics as drugs, ghosts and TV are a couple of songs that contravene the sardonic cartoon worldview we've come to expect from the Ramones: the apparently serious "Searching For Something" concerns a girlfriend's move to an upstate ashram, while "Venting (It's A Different World Today)" offers the bizarre spectacle of Ramone singing about something he actually cares about – the "sick fuckin' world with a violent affliction", which "really, really bugs me". When Joey despairs of the way society is going down the plughole, things must be bad.